Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

Reaching back into the archives (I’ve been blogging long enough to have archives!) and offering this as semesters and terms begin to wind down.

Tales Told Out of School

I am waiting.  I am waiting hopefully and patiently for the pendulum to swing in the other direction.  I am waiting for a cultural shift that will stop glorifying busy and that will stop measuring our worth by our ability to multitask, work long hours, and turn our smartphones into near-permanent appendages.

(And rest assured, I am guilty of all these things).

For now, however, I know that this means tilting at windmills.  So instead, I will write in defense of sabbaticals–both big and small.  At its most literal sabbatical comes from the Hebrew word “shabbat” or sabbath and means ceasing or taking a time of rest–typically, ceasing from work, so that attentions can be devoted elsewhere.  In the academy, of course, it is a break from teaching and other quotidian responsibilities, so that you can take time to do research, travel to archives, work in the lab, develop new…

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Mentoring 2.0

By all accounts, having a mentor is a good thing. A mentor is there to provide advice and guidance.   The most common model in the academy is for junior faculty to be assigned a senior faculty mentor. The senior person helps steer the junior person through the first few years of teaching, figuring out the requirements for tenure, and generally negotiating the landscape of a new institution. The research on mentoring demonstrates its key role in recruiting and retaining good faculty.

Yet there are at least two shortcomings with the current way that mentoring happens on campuses. First, despite its clear benefits to institutions and individuals, we are far from a universal culture of mentoring in higher ed. My non-scientific research on the subject suggests that in the case of junior faculty some institutions assign mentors, some don’t (perhaps due to department size) but do provide broad mentoring support, and some do not have any system, formal or informal, of mentoring. Models for mentoring contingent faculty are few and far between and make the mentoring of junior faculty look positively robust.

Second, where it does exist, the model of one-on-one mentoring is not adequate. What do you do when confronted with a difficult work situation that because of power dynamics can’t be addressed entirely or adequately by your mentor relationship? Let me ground this in a specific example: a junior female faculty member receives a very critical peer evaluation of her teaching from a senior male colleague. Her attempts to discuss the evaluation with her colleague are rebuffed. But this individual is also a close friend of her mentor and has repeatedly sung his praises to her. What recourse does she have? The scenario could even be less dire. Even with the best intentions and careful selection, mentoring matchups don’t always work. What if you have a mentor assigned to you and that person isn’t a good fit (for whatever reason)?

The remedy for both of these shortcomings rest with senior faculty and administrators. We need to commit to and create a culture of mentoring on our campuses. This is an admittedly broad and amorphous goal.   Simply saying that an institution has a commitment to mentoring, will not be adequate. Once it’s been said, though, there are ways to build it into the culture of the place.

Don’t wait or hope for mentoring relationships to be constructed. Obviously, the particulars will vary according to the size and other circumstances at each institution, but make mentoring the responsibility of someone at the vice provost or dean level. That person can certainly delegate the specifics down to the department or division level, but the mentoring buck needs to stop with someone. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to assume that someone else will make it happen. Make the provision of mentoring a part of what’s discussed in campus interviews—we tell job candidates about parking and healthcare, why not let them know that mentoring will be part of their experience? Build the expectation of mentoring into letters of hire. Create a community of mentors on campus, who through face-to-face meetings, and some sort of online platform, can talk to each other about challenges and best practices. And do not limit mentoring to tenure-track faculty. We all know the demographics. If we are neglecting to mentor contingent faculty we are doing them and our institutions a disservice. And what about mid-career faculty? Faculty who need support to make the jump from Associate Professor to Professor rank? Or tenured faculty who are beginning to move into campus administrative roles? Wherever and however possible, weave mentoring into the fabric of campus life.

But as you do, be attentive to the limitations of the one-on-one model described above. What about instead assigning groups of faculty mentors to groups of mentored faculty? In other words, what if we imagined mentoring on the model of networks? This is more consistent with how we conduct much of our academic lives these days anyway on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms that connect us to multiple people at once. The existence of a network would give the mentored faculty options in seeking guidance and resolution to problems. It would also give them an immediate community on campus. Rather than isolated meetings with one mentor, the network could meet at least once a semester and the mentored faculty would meet not just mentors, but other new faculty as well. Meaningful one-on-one relationships might grow out of these networks, and that would be an added bonus. But it would be an outgrowth of a broader network and would be more flexible than simply hoping that one-on-one assignments were a good fit.

Certainly, the network model comes with complications. What if, for example, the members of the network offer conflicting advice? Some conflicts like this could be avoided, though, if the mentors worked together, compared notes, and got to know the mentored faculty as well as possible. Rather than a barrier, then, the need for this kind of mini culture of mentoring within the network of mentors would bolster the overall institutional culture of mentoring.

When mentoring works, everyone wins. The mentored faculty receives guidance and advice that can only contribute to their job satisfaction. The mentors build strong ties with their colleagues. And the institution is stronger for this culture of support. That said, the old model of mentoring tenure-track faculty through the one-on-one model is inadequate. Mentoring needs to be woven into the fabric of an institution at all levels and should embrace a networking model of connecting mentors and mentored.

 

Email: Can’t Live With It…

It’s Monday morning and I just opened my work email.  Despite being armed with a ginormous cup of coffee, beginning to scroll through these messages is undoubtedly going to spark a cascade of negative emotions: frustration, anger, exasperation, exhaustion.  And then there will be that daily internal monologue about being behind on my correspondence and how overwhelmed I feel.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have this reaction to email so what follows are some guidelines about how to engage–and occasionally not engage–with email.  Let’s start with the assumption that you’re smarter than your email inbox and that you can find a way to make sense of those hundreds of stockpiled messages.

How to manage an overflowing inbox.  The upshot: you need a system of folders or task management.  Other folks, far more clever than me, have come up with great ideas.  There are some examples here.  And there are many more if you just Google, “manage your email.”  Because I don’t know about you, but just hoping for the best and saying that at some mythical time in the future I will be “caught up on email” isn’t working for me.

From there you need some rules and structure: all emails answered within 24 hours, setting aside blocks of time when you only work on email, etc.  I know that for me, simply scrolling through the new ones each morning, responding to the really urgent ones, and then forgetting about all the others is not a good system.  So I flag (literally, my email program lets me do this and then I can sort by flagged messages later) the ones I need to come back to that require some time and attention.  Beyond that I’m experimenting with setting aside two or three 15-minute blocks of time each day when I work through the flagged materials.  Setting a timer and saying that I will only work on email focuses me and reduces the temptation to just scroll through all the emails and be overwhelmed.  But choose a discipline that will work for you.  Don’t set yourself up for failure.

Once you do start responding, a different set of guidelines kicks in.  Let’s start with the email that makes you so mad you can barely see straight.  Go ahead, write the angry response.  Say everything you need to say.  Don’t hold back.  But then put it in your draft folder and DO NOT SEND IT.  Let it sit there for at least 24 hours.  Then go back to it and revise accordingly.  Having had the chance to vent will help, but 24 hours later your emotions (hopefully) won’t be running as hot, you can exercise some discretion, and send a measured response.

Let’s continue with that really important email you’re composing where you need to communicate some really critical information.  Don’t bury the lede.  Put the important stuff first.  Think about a list of bullet points, rather than embedding all the material in a series of prose paragraphs.  Highlight the meeting time, date, and place or the deadline you want everyone to adhere to–or put it in bold or italics.  Make it jump out.  If you really want people to pay attention and read the whole thing, keep the overall message as short as possible.  Remember how you don’t have time for your email?  Everyone you send an email to is in the same boat.  So make sure your emails get to the point quickly and don’t require a lot of reading.

And let’s not forget the basics.  Use “reply all” carefully.  Does the whole list of recipients need to see your RSVP for the meeting?  Probably not.  Does the whole list of recipients need to see your trenchant comments about a thorny issue that you were, in fact, invited to share with everyone?  Yes.  Don’t be that person who disrupts the group conversation by mistakenly replying only to the sender.

And finally, sometimes it’s okay to avoid email.  I have a rule that I am getting better at following and have talked about here before: I don’t do work email after 6pm.  No good can come it, unless you count not sleeping well as a good thing.

This is just a start.  What other rules or practices do you have for making email manageable and handling your responses?